If you’re fascinated by the idea of humans traveling through space and curious about how that all works, you’ve come to the right place.

“Houston We Have a Podcast” is the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center from Houston, Texas, home for NASA’s astronauts and Mission Control Center. Listen to the brightest minds of America’s space agency – astronauts, engineers, scientists and program leaders – discuss exciting topics in engineering, science and technology, sharing their personal stories and expertise on every aspect of human spaceflight. Learn more about how the work being done will help send humans forward to the Moon and on to Mars in the Artemis program.

On Episode 161, Joel Walker and Linda Spuler, NASA’s Johnson Space Center director of center operations and emergency manager, respectively, describe the daily tasks involved in running a space center and how we prepare for and respond to scenarios like hurricanes or pandemics. This episode was recorded on August 17th, 2020.

Transcript

Gary Jordan (Host): Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 161, “Running a Space Center.” I’m Gary Jordan, and I’ll be your host today. On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, astronauts, all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human spaceflight. For almost 60 years, NASA’s Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, has led the United States and the world on a continuing adventure of human exploration discovery and achievement. Johnson is on 1,700 acres of land and boasts a workforce of nearly 10,000. And it takes a lot to run the center, especially now. It’s an interesting time where the majority of the center’s workforce is on a telework status. How is the center keeping everyone safe during the Coronavirus pandemic? We’re on the gulf side of Texas. So, what happens if a hurricane comes our way? The same folks that help with these scenarios help to keep the Johnson Space Center running. The directorate itself is called the Center Operations, and they deal with everything from utilities to logistics, security, environmental services, and sustainability efforts to the quote unquote “other stuff” like dealing with fire ants and parking. At the helm of these efforts are Joel Walker and Linda Spuler, Director of Center Operations, and the Emergency Manager, respectively. On today’s episode, we’re going to learn just how all of these things come together. So, here we go, Running the Johnson Space Center with Joel Walker and Linda Spuler. Enjoy.

[ Music]

Host: Joel and Linda, thanks so much for coming on Houston We Have a Podcast today.

Joel Walker: Thanks, Gary. Thanks for having us.

Linda Spuler: Thank you.

Host: I’m excited to talk about the operations of the center. You know, we discuss human spaceflight quite a bit, going out into space and seeing how all of that works, but I think it’s just as fascinating to see how you have to run the space center that’s actually leading some of these efforts, like the International Space Station, like the Orion program, there’s a lot of big programs here, and it’s going to be very interesting to figure out how this works. Mission control, very interesting stuff. I want to get a better understanding first of who we’re talking to and who are the people that are leading these efforts. Joel, why don’t we start with you? A little bit about yourself and what you do here at the center.

Joel Walker: Well, I grew up in East Tennessee, in Knoxville, went to the University of Tennessee, co-oped with Kenney Space Center. That’s how I got started with NASA. Worked there for three or four years, transferred to Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and worked in the D.C. area for a couple years. And then I moved to Houston and been here ever since. My background is logistics, what they would call supply chain management now. And there I lead the team of 100 civil servants. And probably, I don’t know, 500, 600 contractors, depending on what we have going on, managing the center every day, kind of like a city manager’s job, except I’m also the police chief, the landlord, and other things.

Host: I love that description. It is kind of like a city, though, isn’t it? Johnson Space Center is pretty big. And I remember when I first came here, one of the first things that surprised me was its size, the fact that when you get past the gates, you have traffic lights that you have to go through. It is kind of like a little town.

Joel Walker: Yeah, it’s kind of self-contained. We, we get some utilities from off site, but we produce some of our own power, about half of it. So, yeah, it’s a lot of, a lot of the same elements of the city, except Linda and I have to give everybody a desk and a chair and air conditioning and make sure the grass is cut and take care of the roads and all the kind of basic services that help make you protective every day.

Host: I’m very curious to get into what those protective services are. But Linda, I want to get to know you a little bit better. What’s, what’s your background?

Linda Spuler: So, I have grown up in Texas. I’m a second generation JSC employee. My dad was in orbiter projects office. And I am the emergency manager at JSC. So, like Joel said, as a city, we have city services, so I’m the one that plans for emergencies, and also helps respond to emergencies.

Host: Very big. And that’s actually one of the big topics I wanted to address today was we’re kind of in the middle of hurricane season, and just understanding how you prepared this city, the Johnson Space Center, for hurricanes, that hurricane preparedness is very interesting to get into. But first, let’s lay the land for just what we’re talking about here. I’m sure there are people who are listening that have no idea what the Johnson Space Center looks like. And when we are describing it as a city, just what all that means as part of what this is, this community. So, Joel, give us an overview of what the Johnson Space Center is. What, facilities, what elements make up the Johnson Space Center?

Joel Walker: Well, really, it’s kind of four places. The main site is about 1,600 acres. But we also operate the White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico. That’s a part of Johnson Space Center. It’s a small site where we do hazardous testing and stuff. They operate, from our purposes, is they operate kind of independently their own little, little town. But then we have Ellington Field, Ellington Airport. We have our aircraft operations on one side of the runway, and on the other side of the runway we have our big pool for space station operations, the Neutral Buoyancy Lab. Those operate at the airport. It’s about five miles away from us. And then the main part of the campus is a couple hundred buildings. The central part looks like a college campus, if you will, you know, kind of a central area with ponds and green space. We have outlying areas, which are like logistics facilities, some testing facilities, things like that, that kind of sit on the fringes. And when we were built, when we first started in the early 60s, there was very, very little infrastructure around Johnson Space Center. So, while we don’t have buildings on all of our land, we’ve got to protect it, because that’s what we would do any future expansion or operations. So, you know, we kind of started with 1,600 acres, and we’ve held onto it. And then the city has grown around us immensely. So, we’ve kind of protect our own, if you will.

Host: Yeah, and Johnson has an interesting history. I’ve gotten brief glimpses of it. I think it was purchased from I think it was Rice University back in the maybe late 50s, early 60s, and was this, you know, this plot of land, 1,600-acre plot of land. But around it, there really wasn’t much to what we know now as the Clear Lake area.

Joel Walker: Yeah, that’s true. We had, you know, one of the big factors was we had Clear Lake, which allowed us to have barge operations and bring articles in. And we wanted to be close to the water. But there wasn’t any housing nearby. And as Johnson Space Center was being built, elements of it, it started to form, we’re in downtown Houston, which is, you know, 20 miles away, in various parts of other small towns around us. We eventually consolidated on that at the site build. But there wasn’t any housing really for all the employees that sprung up in, you know, a couple years. So, the area around us has really developed a lot in the past 40 years to support human spaceflight.

Host: Yeah, very much so. So, when we’re talking about the operations of this center, of this piece of land, and you talked about the, not just this main one that I’m talking about, but also Ellington Field, also Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, and White Sands. What is it exactly that you’re looking after? What does it mean to operate all of these different locations?

Joel Walker: Well, we’re like a lot, or like a college campus would be. We have our own utility plants. We have two of them on site. Well, three of them on site. We have what we call a central plant. And that’s pumping out all of our cold air, cold water, steam, and all those kind of utilities to our buildings. We have an auxiliary plant that kind of augments that. And then we have backup power for mission control. We have a huge plant that’s dedicated to our mission control operations as a backup power. So, if everything else kind of goes down, you have a backup power plant would come online and power mission control. We just recently, in the last couple or three years, added a combined heat and power plant, because essentially what we used to do is bring in all of our power, like electricity, from off site. And then we’d distribute, you know, turn it into air conditioning and whatever else we’d turn it into, and distribute that to all our buildings. And now we can produce these — two turbine engines, we essentially produce our own power for about 70% of the site. We turn our, our waste heat into steam and use that to augment our boilers for hot water and high-pressure steam and things like that. And we distribute that. I think, you know, one of the things that is a little different about us is that we have a tunnel system. And so, our central plants to our central campus, all the distribution of those utilities goes underground in a tunnel system for about three and a half miles of tunnels underneath us, what I call underneath a space program. It’s more stable because it doesn’t get affected by high winds and some of the things, you know, weather. You just have to watch out for the flooding. So, we try to protect it very carefully with flooding when we have high water.

Host: And I know that’s one of those things that we in Houston, Texas always have to be aware of, the flooding. And I’m sure there’s a number of other things. So, Linda, when you’re looking at the Johnson Space Center, Ellington Field, Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, and maybe even White Sands, as the emergency manager, what are you looking after for all of these sites?

Linda Spuler: So, as an emergency manager, we try to plan and mitigate away from any hazards that we possibly can. So, a lot of our work goes into planning and not necessarily responding to emergencies, because we try to avoid the emergencies. So, for flooding, we put in a lot of efforts to mitigate flooding for the tunnels, for example, we have a flood plan that allowed us to put in some automatic floodgates that will protect the tunnels from flooding if we end up with high water in the tunnel areas, these floodgates will be automatically triggered to kind of rise up and close as the water gets higher. And we’ve also got some floodgates in several of our buildings, mission control building and things like that to keep it from, from affecting the infrastructure. White Sands, we don’t have to worry so much about flooding in White Sands. But extreme heats and things like that. And we have a team of emergency management out there that I work closely with.

Host: Very nice. And I know you mentioned the integrity of the buildings themselves. I know flooding is definitely one of those things that you definitely have to watch out for. But we do have the buildings themselves I believe, correct me if I’m wrong, Joel, you mentioned backup power, that can be one thing to support the mission control center. But I know the building itself, I believe is actually built to withstand high winds and basically take a beating for a lot of the elements that could be thrown at it.

Joel Walker: Yeah, we have standards that we build our buildings to. It started off in the 60s with like 90 mile per hour winds. Our roof needed to be able to handle that. And now I believe we’ve upped that to like 110.

Host: Wow.

Joel Walker: But it’s essentially a category two storm. And, you know, we’ve gotten a lot smarter about bad weather, if you will. As you know, we are, we’re flat, we’re just like perfectly flat. We’re like 18 feet above sea level on one side of the center. And you go all the way to the other side of the center, and I think you’re at like 21 feet. So, we’re right on Clear Lake, which is right on, which feeds down into Galveston, into the Gulf of Mexico. So, you know, being close to a barge dock is awesome. When you have a storm, the water kind of gets pushed up into you. And then Houston, all the drainage for Houston kind of flows down our way. So, when Houston gets full, it starts, you know, coming downstream to us. So, we’ve, you know, we always talked about hurricanes as wind events, and how do we withstand a wind event. But a lot of times it’s the water that’s, that’s the trouble for you. We are right now building a new emergency operations center, which will withstand a cat five storm. It’s essentially an office building during the day. But when we get into hurricanes, it will be a place where our team can kind of go and hide for a little while. Because under current operations, if it gets really bad, anything above a category two storm, we don’t feel comfortable leaving people on site.

Host: See, that’s interesting. That’s that balance between, Joel, what you’re thinking of as operating a center, and Linda, just being, having that sense of not just reacting to emergencies, but preparing for them. I know in terms of the big list, Joel, that you went over in the beginning of the things that you look after as the city manager and the police chief and all that, one of them are the facilities. And looking after new construction, you have, of course, these facilities meant for emergencies, something to withstand a cat five. But I know we’re also doing a lot of sustainability efforts. A lot of the buildings we have on site are LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] certified. What are some of those efforts like?

Joel Walker: Well, we’re building all, and NASA is, our standard now for a new building is LEED silver, which is kind of a, you know, you want to have all of the energy savings things incorporated into the building. You want to orient it a certain way. You want to operate as a certain way for energy savings, for comfort. So, we build all of our new building’s kind of this new way. But on the maintenance side, you’ve got to think of our maintenance personnel. The way I like to think of it is they have to be able to operate on a 1965 Mustang. And they also have to be able to drive a new Tesla. Right? So, it’s a real mix. And one of the things that we’ve done is we’ve reused buildings a lot. We’ll take a, in lieu of building a brand-new building, we’ll take a building and we’ll modify it. And some of those modifications have taken a 1965 building and turned it into a LEED building. So, so, that can be a great way to go. You keep the same location. You keep the, all the advantages you had of the older building, and then you’re just going to upgrade it to all the new standards with all the new systems and everything. And we’ve done that a lot. There’s a lot of, lot of reuse, as we’ve gone through, you know, Apollo to Shuttle to Space Station to, you know, all the new programs and stuff. We have not, you know, you don’t, you don’t rebuild Johnson Space Center every time a new program comes. You’ve got to be flexible and adapt and reuse and be able to change what you have to meet what the new program’s needs are.

Host: That’s right. And now I can take full advantage of some of these efforts you’re talking about, Joel, because I work in building two. And building two is, well, actually, it might have been the first building that was constructed at the Johnson Space Center. But now it’s LEED gold. It’s one of those new renovation efforts.

Joel Walker: Yeah, that was our first effort at renovating one’s elite standards. We learned a lot. And, in fact, the construction folks in the Houston area is one of the first buildings in the area to, to get renovated into, into green LEED standards. We also have the first platinum building in NASA, which is the highest LEED standard. So, we’ve done a lot of, a lot of work like that. It helps us downstream as we’re doing maintenance, and as we’re operating the building. It’s cheaper. And it’s really, really nice. It’s a very great thing to do.

Host: What does it take to become LEED platinum? What sorts of things do you have to have? What sorts of I guess capabilities of the building?

Joel Walker: Oh, it’s, it involves the landscaping, you know, you’re trying to do low maintenance landscaping. You’re trying to do solar hot water. Your, your systems that bring outside air in, treat it in a certain way so that you don’t use as much energy, the materials you build it out of are recycled materials. In fact, your construction process has to recycle any waste they have. The way you orient the building, the view, you know, the windows, the way the building works. So, there’s a lot to it. There’s a lot of, you get points, you know, it’s like a checklist, but a thousand things that give you points. And you go through and try to incorporate all these energy saving and recycling systems in a building. You get enough points and you get certified as platinum.

Host: It’s a big deal. That’s a lot of work for sure. Now, Linda, I’m going to toss it over to you, because I’m thinking you get, you get all these energy saving things for the facility, of course looking at that sustainability factor. But I know you mentioned a couple facilities and capabilities of Johnson Space Center floodgates and wind resistant buildings. What are some of these features of Johnson Space Center that you’re looking at, not just for buildings, but just the whole center for emergency preparedness?

Linda Spuler: So, like Joel said, with having our utilities underground helps a lot when it comes to wind events, so we don’t have to worry as much about sustainable power during wind events. And, in fact, we tend to do better than our neighbors usually when it comes to keeping power during storms. We also don’t sacrifice any safety or emergency equipment or anything like that when we do the LEED buildings. In fact, most of the new buildings, they’re incorporating mass notification systems into the buildings. So, in the newer buildings, our emergency dispatchers can actually speak over an intercom to the occupants of certain buildings. So, as we’re building these new buildings, we’re taking the newer technology into consideration and trying to leverage that against the LEED capabilities and make sure that we have a good tight system to help make sure that our folks are safe.

Host: And that blends in very nicely to the next topic, which you were talking about emergency responders. Some of the capabilities of not only emergency response, but also, I guess, I don’t know if this folds into security and then some of the medical personnel we have on site.

Linda Spuler: Yes, we actually have our own ambulance crew that is there during the day, during working hours, during the regular workweek. And so, our emergency dispatchers dispatch our security folks, our ambulance folks, and we have fire protection services on site as well that they’re kind of the first line of defense. And we send them out when we have automatic fire alarms in buildings or reports of smoke. And so, our dispatch center dispatches just like a small city. They would dispatch fire security and medical personnel to any type of event that happens at JSC.

Host: How about that? Now, Joel, part of the security is, you know, actually having security guards. I believe the entire perimeter of the Johnson Space Center is fenced in. So, some of those security measures that you have to look after.

Joel Walker: Yeah, so we do, you have to have a badge to get on site, or you have to be invited and get badged. And their screening like you would think of maybe at a military base or something like that. And then there’s a whole kind of infrastructure involved around that, you know, how do you, how do you do that, how do you issue them, how do you print them, how do you check them? And so, you have kind of layered security. So, you know, I can have a visitor to my office. That’s one thing, having a visitor go into mission control is quite another thing. And so, it just even, even a regular employee will have access to what they need on site. They won’t necessarily have access to every place on site. Right? So, you’re trying to make it a little bit tougher or tighter as you go into the most, the more critical areas. And we try to keep everybody, you know, while you can go a lot of places, you know, everybody’s doing work, and everybody’s got a special lab or special operations. Even in buildings where we have like high bays, if I go over there, I have access, I can go in, but I’ve got to pay attention, because they may be operating an overhead crane or doing specific training that day. So, we try to manage that through security. Security handles our communication security. They handle the people security. And then they do, you know, traffic patrols, parking tickets. And then normal mundane stuff. We try to be prepared. If something big happens, you know, we’re kind of the first line of defense. But a lot of it is, what you might think about it in a city, if you had a big fence around your city, and not everybody was invited.

Host: I love that. Yeah. There’s the security is absolutely essential. I know even, even today, you have just 24/7 security around, around the Johnson Space Center. And the gates open and close just depending on the time of day. I’m going through my list of different operations here. And one that I think sticks out that’s possibly unique to the Johnson Space Center compared to a lot of other offices, what makes running a space center a space center, is the environmental and hazardous chemicals side of things. There’s, you’ve got a lot biology here at the Johnson Space Center. You’ve got, you know, you’re dealing with rockets. So, some of those elements. Linda, I’ll toss it over to you, because I think there is emergency responses to hazardous chemicals planned for, for Johnson Space Center.

Linda Spuler: Definitely. One of the, one of the more fun things about my job is I get to work with the very diverse group of people from different organizations. And we have very close relationships with folks in our health and human performance directorate and occupational health. And they’re the ones that are kind of the keeper of the kingdom for hazardous materials, and so they, they have databases of hazardous materials. We work closely with our safety directorate, mission, mission safety and quality assurance directorate to make sure that folks are following the proper procedures when, when they are using hazard, hazardous materials or hazardous equipment, and we spend a lot of time as emergency management, like I said, a lot of it is upfront work. So, we try to avoid the emergencies. So, there’s a lot of preplanning that goes into hazardous operations and when hazardous chemicals are used. But we do have plans in place should something go wrong. And we have a close relationship with both Houston fire department and Houston police department. And we run exercises and drills to make sure that we’re ready and able to respond should something happen.

Joel Walker: Linda even gives me a hard time, because we have all the, you think of a city, you have all of the industrial chemicals to run the plant. And sometimes it’s, you know, it’s like having a pool in your backyard. The chemicals you have, you have to maintain them, maintain them in a certain way so they don’t leach into the soil and all that kind of fun stuff. But at the, at the plant, at the JSC, thinking about how big we are, sometimes it’s the chemical’s OK, but the amount of the chemical you have makes it a whole different story. So, lots of, lots of backup plans about what we do, lots of drainage systems, containment systems, a lot of things like that that happen just with running the city itself.

Host: Yeah, it’s so, it’s so interesting. I wanted to focus on some of those, some of those things that you, now, you talk about the preparedness for these hazardous chemicals, but I’m trying to think of specific examples of the Johnson Space Center. I know one is we have a very large thermal vacuum chamber. And I believe there are some, you know, not I guess facilities, but also chemicals that have to be carefully worked with to make that thing run. So, Joel, a little bit about what that thermal vacuum chamber is, and then some of the ways that we have to deal with these hazardous chemicals.

Joel Walker: Well, it’s a, it’s a vacuum chamber that you can put a spacecraft in, and it simulates outer space. It pulls a vacuum on it. You can take it down to, and I don’t know the technical words, but really, really, really, really, really cold. So, what you’re trying to do is test a spacecraft to know that all the things are going to work once it gets launched and gets out to its proper location. Uses a lot of liquid nitrogen. And so, we have to look over all the things that go into that operation. The engineering directorate would be the organization that operates a test and maintains the chamber itself, the systems inside the chamber. We would maintain the building and cognizance over with safety over the hazards and all the stuff that goes into that. So, we have to work with our whole team. It’s not, you know, there’s, emergency response is great. What you hope to is not to have an emergency response. So, you know, Linda will coordinate all these plans with everyone to find out what, what exactly is going on and how are they mitigating their hazards, and how are they operating it, and what hours is that test going to be, and who’s watching over it, and how are they planning all that? And so, kind of putting it together, so before you ever start an operation, you know, what they’ll do if it goes wrong. And she does plans on top of plans, so she has a, she has a plan for what you do if it goes wrong and a plan for what you do if the plan that you put in place goes wrong also. So, lots of, lots of contingency planning to make sure that we’re prepared for whatever happens.

Host: Fascinating. Now, Linda, that means you must be involved with I guess a lot of the testing that use a lot of these hazardous chemicals, a lot of these special facilities on Johnson Space Center, I guess they can, this can extend to White Sands as well and some of the other facilities. You’re there as part of the planning process, and your, your mindset, your, your value add is you’re thinking about the emergency responses if this were to go bad, you know, this is how we would respond, this is how we would respond as a backup to that backup to that backup. That’s, that’s your, that’s your role in some of these critical space tests.

Linda Spuler: That’s true. I like to tell folks I’m kind of the liaison between all the different responding groups. Like I said, we work closely with health and human performance and safety and HFD and HPD, and so I’m kind of the one above everyone, kind of making sure that we’re looking at all the different pieces and looking at the big picture, and then putting all those little details together.

Host: I love it. Joel, you said you had a background in logistics and supply chain management. And I know one of the capabilities going away from emergency response and procedures for a second, some of the items and services that make up center operations are logistics. So, you’re talking the shipping, receiving. You’re talking the vehicles. You’re talking the storage. That’s all under center operations. Right?

Joel Walker: Yeah, it is. And it’s, it’s kind of one of those background services, if you think about it, you know, you know, I need copy paper for my printer, or I’ve got to go downtown and I need to get a, see if I can borrow a car. And then lots of the other stuff that comes in just for the industrial plant comes through logistics. They also kind of track our property. You know, we maintain a property system to make sure we don’t lose anything, and to make sure that we’re, you know, tracking our assets. They operate that system for us. And then when you want to get rid of something, if you’ve got a, you know, piece of equipment that’s outdated now and you’re replacing it, it’s the, it’s the logistics organization that comes and gets it and then processes it through an excess system to make sure we either recycle it or we’re able to sell it and get some value out of it. So, they manage all that kind of stuff for us. Member warehouses, they do furniture, office moves, some of the — buy new furniture, repair furniture, they do a lot of things like that that are supportive of, you know, me keeping working at my office uninterrupted.

Host: And then on top of just the, in the office, you’re also managing outside the office. You’re, are you looking after the facility as a whole, the lawn, the mall area, as well as, and I have here, as in other stuff item, some of the wild animals that are on site?

Joel Walker: Yeah, we do. And some of them we like, some of them we don’t like so much. But, you know, since we have, you know, big open space, and it’s kind of pristine, it’s kind of, probably half our center is kind of pristine Texas prairie. We have lots of animals. And we’re, on one of our borders is the Armand Bayou Nature Center, which is a protective habitat for wild animals. You know, the favorite one everybody has is our deer. We have 275 roughly deer on our site. They’ll be quiet during the day, and you can see them in the field and stuff. And if you ever come out on the weekends or at night, they’re just walking down their streets and trying to use the crosswalks and do the proper thing. But they’re everywhere. And everybody loves the deer. But with the deer comes snakes, possums, skunks, bobcats, coyotes, lots of, lots of otter even, lots of wild animals that you might not think. And so, it’s kind of, we have a wildlife biologist on site, and we, we brought one on site because we were having more and more kind of people/wild animal interactions. So, we have this wildlife biologist that tries to operate our wildlife, if you will, maintain them, control them in a way that’s consistent and congruent with what we’re, with our physical operations. We don’t want, we don’t want somebody to get hurt or bit or, and every now and then, as you can imagine, a deer will get hit by a car. It doesn’t happen very frequently, but we need somebody on site to take care of that and manage that and make sure we’re doing the right thing. But they also, kind of consult with us on, we talk about building a new building, or we do bird counts on site, we have a rookery on site. So, we have, we’re in the Texas, what’s it called, Linda, the Texas Gulf Coast Flyway. It’s one of the —

Linda Spuler: Yeah.

Joel Walker: — Big migration paths for northern birds going down to Mexico for the winter. And so, we’re kind of a stopover point. And so, we try to keep the bird window collisions down and all that kind of stuff. So, it is, it is interesting. At times it’s kind of aggravating. I have been in a — I was in a meeting with our center director one day when one of the secretaries knocked in the door and interrupted and called me out into the suite. And I thought, boy, this must be really important. Well, it was, because there was a bat in the suite, flying around the suite. And I’m not sure why she thought I was a great person to take care of it, other than I knew our wildlife biologist’s phone number. So, we got him, we got him cornered in the office, and we had the right people come up and take care of it. So, we try to keep those interactions down, and we try to, you know, we don’t feed our wildlife and do that kind of thing. We try to peacefully co-exist. But it’s, but it’s great, you know, you’re in our urban area, and you come to work, and then you feel like you’re in half of a nature preserve and half of a space center. It’s great.

Host: You know, Joel, it’s, I’m taking a snapshot of everything that we’ve talked about so far, just the things that you manage. I mean, it’s just incredibly diverse. I mean, you’re talking about the utilities, you’re talking about powering the center, you’re talking about buildings, security, emergency management, logistics for shipping and vehicles. And now we’re talking, we’re here talking about animals. Just what an incredibly diverse directorate to be a part of.

Joel Walker: Yeah, it’s one of the things I really like about the job I have. I have a short attention span. And so, you know, some people want to be a nuclear physicist and want to, you know, really hone in on a specific technicality, and our directorate is a little bit of everything. And I laugh and tell somebody, you know, somebody will ask me, you know, about a certain function or a certain thing sometimes, and I’ll say, well, it’s essentially, if you can’t think of somebody else on site who has that specialty, it probably belongs to center ops someplace. Right? It’s my, it’s my job to take care of it. So, we do take care of, you know, very known specific things. And then a lot of our job is and whatever else shows up.

Host: There you go. And the other stuff, duties as assigned.

Joel Walker: That’s it.

Host: That’s right. I want to, I want to take this moment to get into just where we are today. One of the, part of the reason I wanted to have you guys on was not only to talk about all of this great and diverse things that, what it takes to run a space center, but just the landscape of where we are today. Two items that come up are preparedness for hurricanes, just something that is an annual thing, everybody on the center is always looking out for hurricanes and looking at, you know, the safety of everyone on the center and making sure that everything’s going to run smoothly. And now we’re in this interesting time of COVID-19 and how that’s, and how that’s affecting center operations. So, Linda, I want to start with you with some of the hurricane preparedness and operations, just some of the considerations when it comes to specifically during the hurricane season, what you’re gearing up for and how you prepare everyone at the center to get prepared for this, this time of year.

Linda Spuler: So, yes, hurricane season is always one of the busiest times of my job, because, like I said, a lot of what I do is planning and preparation. And planning for hurricanes, that is one of our most expected disasters at JSC and something we can’t control. So, what we try to do is make sure that we have a robust plan in place. And we encourage folks to plan personally. And I know that’s been pretty on folks’ minds, especially with the pandemic, about how to plan during a pandemic. And I would say that folks really need to think ahead, have a plan, consider that the pandemic is probably going to change what your plan may have been last year or the year before. A lot of the shelters in the area are operating differently. They’re trying to limit numbers of folks, keep up the social distancing protocols. So, I would say have a plan, write it down, make sure your family is all involved in the planning process, make sure you have someone outside of the danger zone that’s a contact that kind of knows what your plan is when you enact it, where your headed is if you’re staying at home, and that way you have someone outside of the disaster area that, that folks can contact. With a pandemic, water becomes key, and I think a lot of folks are often surprised that when you lose power, you often lose running water. And so, if you’re new to the area, it’s not just about suffering through no air conditioning and no power. You may not have running water during an emergency. So, all those things should be taken into consideration. If you have young children or elderly, you need to take the fact that you may not have running water into consideration. Even just keeping enough water on hand during the emergency, we tell people to plan for 72 hours without help from the outside world. And in Houston, that’s a lot of water to drink. We recommend a gallon per person and per pet, per day. So, that adds up pretty quickly if you have a larger household. Food, 72 hours’ worth of food. We caution folks that emergency services from fire departments will not necessarily be available. We’ve had incidences in Hurricane Ike, for example, there were several structures in Galveston that burnt to the ground in four feet of water because of electrical shortages that caused fires. And with four feet of water, obviously emergency personnel were not able to get to the structure. So, things like that are definitely, you want to take all that into consideration when you’re making your plan. For our plan for the center, we’ve got preparation pretty down pat. We’ve worked really hard at that over the years. And in the time of the pandemic, I think we’ve talked about this in the town halls, but we would not expect general employees to have to come back on site to save office space. If you have a particular lab or something that’s up and running, or you’re worried about lab equipment, that would be something that you may want to work through your management to make sure that those things are saved. But for the general employees, we’re not going to ask folks to come back on site just to save office space. Joel and I are actually part of a team that manages the hurricane away from the center. So, for very large hurricanes, we, our plan is to relocate. We’ve got a plan in place to go to the Round Rock area. And we can set up mobile command post out there that allows us to keep our websites running and make emergency notifications if necessary. We take security folks, IRD folks, and public affairs folks with us, so we have a tie in back to human resources as well. So, we make sure that we have the right team there available to keep the center up to date on what’s happening. Our emergency management website, jscsos.com, is not behind the NASA firewall, so folks can get to that and see what’s going on and see the status of the center. And our emergency notification system does not run on JSC servers either. So, if our power goes down at JSC, we can still send notifications to folks on their personal devices and to their work emails and things like that. So, we basically recommend as part of preparation to go in as an employee and check your emergency contact information.

Host: A lot of elements here. There’s, preparation on the personal side, there’s preparation on the center’s side, and then also communication is just one of those critical things, making sure that everyone’s prepared, so if you do need to, for whatever reason, relocate to the Round Rock area, that you’re notifying the right people, and that everybody’s safely traveling from one place to the other, just a massive responsibility to look after when you’re talking about hurricane preparedness, just one of those things for just living in that Gulf Coast area.

Linda Spuler: That is true. And it’s, like I said, it’s always on folks’ minds. As, as most of you probably know, this is a hyperactive season this year. We’ve actually got two areas of interest that we’re monitoring in the Atlantic. We are lucky enough to have a meteorologist on site, spaceflight meteorology group that we work very closely with to tailor forecasts, to pinpoint to JSC, Ellington, and Sonny Carter. So, so, we’ve got, you know, very, very up to date information about the weather and how it may affect us. And we take that into consideration when we execute our plans.

Host: Perfect. Now, moving past the preparedness phase, let’s take a look at a certain case study, and that case study being Harvey. This is one where, you know, preparedness turns into action when it comes to reacting to a storm. And this one is definitely on the minds of every individual who’s lived in Houston and lived through this storm is just how much it affects daily life. So, the lessons learned from Harvey, some of the actions we took, and some of the actions that we will take in the future.

Joel Walker: Well, you know, Harvey was a little bit different for us. You know, normally we would see a storm coming, we have a certain timeline, we decide, OK, we need to release employees. The average, you know, the average employees. Mission control would make a call independent what they need to do. And then we would keep like 65 facilities people on site as a ride out team. And those people would stay. If it was a cat one, a cat one storm, they would stay through the storm and then be kind of the first responders for damage control and trying to keep the plant up and running if we can. Harvey was a little bit of a different animal because it was a hurricane, but it didn’t hit JSC, right, didn’t hit Houston. It hit south of us significantly. But we got the rain. So, on Harvey, oh, like a day before it was supposed to hit, and I think it was Corpus Christi, or a little bit south of Corpus Christi, they were talking about a lot of rain. And one of my facilities, my facilities division chief was supposed to go on vacation, and just said, hey, look, this is making me a little bit nervous. Yeah, but we’re not going to get the winds, we’re not going to get this, but we did get some rain, so he said that he would, he wanted to stay on site and just, and keep, you know, four or five people within, just in case something came up, because we do have, you know, things like roof leaks and that kind of stuff. And he said, I just want to keep a small team, just in case we get some roof leaks out of it. So, that five-person team essentially became our ride out group. And we had some other operations that were ongoing that we did not evacuate. So, we just kind of went into a weekend saying this is going to be a rainy, floody kind of weekend. And it turned out so much more. So, that five, six-person team, and whoever else happened to be working at the time, were essentially stubbed for a couple of days. But we had James Webb Space Telescope was under testing, and it could not be, it was in that big chamber we were talking about earlier, and you can’t, you can’t, you couldn’t turn the test off and back on. It was a, you know, three- or four-month test. So, since we had to kind of operate the site with people that we had on site, so the people you had in mission control had to stay. The people in facilities that were there stayed. People that were in security stayed. And so, whoever came on shift, was unfortunate enough to come on shift when the storm started, were stuck for about three days. So, it was a little bit, it was different for us. And we had to, we did OK with the flooding part on site. We had some buildings, some of our lower smaller buildings get some water in them. But the amount of rain really just, it just soaked the roofs, and we had lots and lots and lots of roof leaks. So, essentially what you had on site was five or six additional people to what you would have had on a third shift. And a band of rain would come through, and then our, you know, facilities folks would say, hey, look, we’ve got big leaks, you know, we’ve got leaves impacting the drain over in a certain area. So, that, that rain event would come through. You’d get maybe an hour between bands. They would run over, fix that problem, and then take shelter again for the next band to come through. And that went on for about three days. It was, we got, you know, essentially a year’s worth of rainfall in a weekend. So, it was, anything that could flood did flood. The tunnels stayed dry. The tunnel systems worked well. That flood system Linda was talking about, that worked well. But, you know, just getting around, even getting the people that were working on James Webb Space Telescope, they were in a hotel across the street. So, it kind of became, for them, you know, one group had worked maybe a 10-hour shift, and we would call them and say, if you want to change shifts, there’s about a 30 minute window. We can get you over to the hotel and get the next shift back to operate however long that they have to operate. So, they ate a lot of MREs [Meal, Ready to Eat] that we had and things like that. So, it was interesting having these scientists. A lot of them were from Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. And, you know, they came down to do a certain thing on a certain plan and said, “wow, I never thought I would be stuck in a building eating military rations while I was testing a futuristic spacecraft.”

Host: Just, yeah, just, that’s what you have to deal with when you’re, when you’re running the space center. How about that? It’s just, and like you said, I wanted to pick this case study specifically because it was just, it was a historic storm, with just the amount of rain it brought, and just the action plan is just something that it’s interesting to prepare for something that beats a lot of historic records.

Linda Spuler: It definitely beat historic records that we don’t want to beat again. The National Weather Service actually had to create a new color for their chart because the amount of rain that we saw in that short period of time that didn’t have a color, so they added a kind of light pink that they now call Harvey pink to their charts. And it’s about 50 plus rain range. So, that, that was definitely something we don’t want to see again. But it did make us look at our hurricane plan and the way our plan was triggered prior to Harvey, the way the plan was triggered. Like Joel says, we typically have about 60 folks that stay on site to handle facilities’ damage during the storm and immediately after the storm. Since the hurricane plan wasn’t triggered in full, we only had that small skeleton grew. And they did a phenomenal job. But obviously very fatiguing with that short staff. So, we’ve actually rewritten our hurricane plan to remove the triggers being tropical storm force winds. And now we have multiple triggers basically at the discretion of Joel and the center director and the spaceflight meteorology group input that will allow us to trigger those plans and get more help for those folks that stay on site.

Host: That was, oh, go ahead, Joel.

Joel Walker: I was just going to say, and what Linda said there was key too is we have plans on top of plans. And that provides great structure. But the folks that you have on those teams, they’ve got to be creative, they’ve got to be flexible, and it is a time where you, you know, it’s all hands on deck, and you do whatever it is you have to do. You’re not looking at somebody’s job description at that point. You’re just finding somebody that can do that job and figure out, you know, whatever unknown comes at you, you’ve got to deal with it.

Host: You know, and this is just one of those things that it’s just one of, it’s just an interesting thing that you have to prepare for when you’re running a space center is, is Mother Nature just coming knocking at your door and changing the whole way that normal operations is run. And that’s the time that we’re in right now with this COVID-19 pandemic, you know, we talked about how the space center looked so different during Harvey, you know, all of us were working from home at the time, because none of us could actually drive onto the center. I, at the time, was living right off of Buffalo Bayou, which was enormously flooded, and I was basically trapped in my apartment building. But now we’re living in a time where we’re living in a global pandemic, and we’re back at that telework status. So, Joel, I want to pass it over to you. What is life at the Johnson Space Center, or operations at the Johnson Space Center during a global pandemic?

Joel Walker: Well, you know, we’re operating the space station, so we don’t, and we operate 24/7, so we don’t ever completely close unless you’re in that kind of extreme hurricane scenario where everybody’s having to evacuate the area. So, what we’ve done is we have a senior staff group that looks at all of our operations. And so, we’ve, we’ve deemed some stuff essential and critical. And so, so I would say we’re 15% staffed on site for the folks that have to come in and do mission control and keep the plant running and do some of our critical operations, because we’re, we, you know, we had the Dragon flight and landing, and we did all of that under a pandemic. And then what we’ve had to do is everybody else got a couple days to prepare to transition to working from home. And when we first started, it was, OK, so, is this going to be a week at home, is this going to be two weeks? You really didn’t know. And it’s just kind of gone on and on and on. So, I think we’ve been extremely successful in being able to transition to this new way of doing business and keep things moving as well as we have. We haven’t, I haven’t heard a lot of talk about all these schedules slipping and that kind of stuff. You know, we tend to be, if you really need to be on site to do something specifically, then you can, but don’t do things that you don’t, that don’t need to be done on site. But a good example from my organization, we have some construction that was critical that is continuing. I would have a person that was, would do, you know, quality assessment of that construction. In the past, they would walk down from their office, you know, they’d do all their paperwork, walk down from their office, inspect their construction site, walk back up to their office and write their report kind of thing. Now they’re doing all the prep work from home. They come on site for a couple hours and do their inspection. And then they leave again. Because we don’t want to put anybody else on site. You know, we want to keep that load as small as it, as we can so that critical folks can still have their spatial distancing, and we don’t crowd things. So, I think we’ve been really, really good at it. Everybody’s learned how to do these video chats and all this kind of stuff from home. It’s been, it’s been — a crash course on how to telework.

Host: It really has. And I think the length of time, as you said, has just gone on and on and on. That’s been I think the most surprising is just, because we’ve had periods of time where we had to work from home before. Harvey was just one of those things. But, you know, it was a couple days, and then we were, and then the storm passed, the water level seceded, and then we were, and then we were right back on site during our normal thing. But this is just, it’s a completely new way of business. And, you know, one of the ways that we’re monitoring this, one of the ways that we keep people safe is by putting the center itself at a stage level. And it’s kind of a teleworking stage. And I think it’s a really good model for looking at the pandemic and making sure that we’re assessing the pandemic for the local area and how it affects the people on site. So, Joel, a little bit about how the center stage level works for COVID-19.

Joel Walker: Well, so, we have the critical essential folks on site doing what they have to do physically today. And we’re looking at, you know, when do we start bringing that bigger population? And how do we, how do we, how do we stage that? You know, is it everybody at one time? Is it in phases? So, we’ve really done gone through and identified tasks, you know, what are the next set of tasks that we would like to see done on site? What are the next set of people we would like to see? And we’re trying to kind of phase it out, so maybe it’s 20% at times, and then they work for a couple weeks, and then maybe we add 20% more, then work for a couple of weeks, and we try to do that. So, on the back end would be the folks that are, whose job function is more telework suitable, put it that way, maybe more administrative, or they have some other issue, a health condition where they’re not comfortable coming back yet kind of thing. And so, we’re trying to phase, phase this so it’s not, you know, a big shock at once, it’s not going to be, on Monday, all these things happen. And since we have astronaut health that we look after, we’ve got a lot of doctors on site. And so we have our health and human performance directorate is looking at all the different metrics that are out there and looking at how they play together, how, you know, the national metrics and the state metrics and the local metrics, as far as positivity rates and hospital capacity, and, you know, number of people in the hospital itself, cases, and all these different things, how all of that stuff plays together. We looked at it in fine detail. And then they brief our pandemic response group and we look at how that plays for, you know, when will we be comfortable enough within the first set of the next stage of folks coming back on site and so I think we’re a little bit a way’s away from it. And, you know, it’s kind of like a hurricane. You never know which way it’s going. Schools are starting back up. And, you know, things are happening in the community. Is that going to drive up the cases or drive up the hospitalizations? Or is this, you know, are we starting to see the tail end of this thing? I don’t think anybody’s going to be super comfortable until we get a vaccine. But we’ll be able to bring more people on site as the pandemic recedes a little bit. We’re making, in the meantime, we’re making office changes, logistics is getting supplies, you know, hand sanitizer, just masks, we’re doing lots of procedures, we’re doing lots of communication with folks about here’s how we want you to work, here’s what we’ll do, talk to us if you’re uncomfortable. What, you know, what makes you uncomfortable? What else can we do? So, we have a lot of new rules in place that will be in place when we start back. And a lot of new things that folks will have to do, and different behaviors will have to change. But we’re trying to be as planned for it as we possibly can be so it’s a smooth transition back of the right people at the right time.

Host: Now, Linda, how some of the emergency responses and emergency management has changed under COVID-19, we talked about a lot of people working from home. So, just how, how things have changed, how that landscape has shifted for COVID-19.

Linda Spuler: Well, our dispatch center has gotten a little bit of relief from regular calls, because there aren’t as many folks on site to have emergencies. But really, our landscape hasn’t changed terribly much. Like I said, the number of incidences for regular code emergencies on site, ambulance calls, fire alarm calls, those kinds of things have been down, because there are less people working. But we were able to do our center wide hurricane exercise remotely with folks teleworking, sent communications out to the JSC population to test our emergency notification system. We’ve been looking at our pandemic plan. Like Joel said, we have a plan for everything. We do have a pandemic plan that was in place before COVID. And we’re using lessons learned from our response to take another look at that plan and update it as necessary. So, so, really, just kind of business as usual for emergency management.

Host: I love that.

Joel Walker: But I’ll tell you, I think Linda’s going to have to write a couple more chapters on our pandemic plan, because this has been going on so long. You know, we had, just like everybody else, you now have more information, more information, more information, what causes it, what would help, you know, what’s the thing to do, what not to do? And that has changed so much through the course of this pandemic that, you know, we’re continually learning about a better way to do stuff, or what might be a better protection for somebody. So, there’s a ton of education as we’ve been going through this. There’s going to be a lot of lessons learned.

Host: Well, I’ll tell you what, I think, you know, we, definitely as an employee here, I thank you both for your work, for keeping the, for keeping the center safe. I feel comfortable with the way things are done. Working from home, Joel, you mentioned administrative. I can get a lot of my work done from home, and I’m sure that’s the case for a lot of individuals. And it shows with just what we’ve accomplished, even during the pandemic. Joel, you mentioned, you mentioned the Dragon mission, the Demo-2 mission, launch and landing, both under a pandemic, and we did it successfully. So, a lot of great stuff happening. To Joel and Linda, very much appreciate your time coming on Houston We Have a Podcast. What a wonderfully diverse topic today, the Directorate of Center Operations, and all the things you do and all the things you have to prepare for, really appreciate both of your time today.

Joel Walker: Thank you very much. Thanks for having us.

Linda Spuler: Thank you for having us.

[ Music]

Host: Hey, thanks for sticking around. Really interesting conversation we had today with Joel Walker and Linda Spuler. Thanks for joining us and learning more about the Johnson Space Center. It’s been an interesting time, so it’s good to see the inside scoop of what’s going on there. You can check out more episodes of our podcast, Houston We Have a Podcast. We’re on NASA.gov/podcast. You can click on us. There’s also a few other podcasts that are across the whole agency. You can check out some of their episodes as well. If you want to know more about what’s going on at the Johnson Space Center specifically, you can go to NASA.gov/johnson. If you want to talk to us at the Houston We have a Podcast, you can visit us at the Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Use the hashtag #AskNASA on your favorite platform to submit an idea for the show. Just make sure to mention it’s for Houston We Have a Podcast. This episode was recorded on August 17th, 2020. Thanks to Alex Perryman, Pat Ryan, Norah Moran, Belinda Pulido, Jennifer Hernandez, and Jenny Knotts. Thanks again to Joel Walker and Linda Spuler for taking the time to come on the show. Give us a rating and feedback on whatever platform you’re listening to us on and tell us what you think of the show. We’ll be back next week.